An unbelievable honor

In one of my book give-aways last year, Ramisa the Authoress, a blogger from Australia, scored a copy of Risking Exposure. Lucky for me. She read it, loved it, and placed it on her Favorite Books of All Time list.
She blogged about my book, sponsored a give-away contest, and in general has been unbelievably supportive of my debut novel from half a world away.

In her most recent blog post, she reviewed and categorized some of her 2014 favorites. Risking Exposure figured twice into her list of Best in Books - books you 'pushed' the most to your friends, and books you found thought-provoking/ life-changing.

Whoa.Thank you, Ramisa.
As a writer, that's amazing. Humbling. An unbelievable honor.

If that weren't enough, she mentioned me again under the Looking Ahead category, listing my as yet unfinished, unnamed sequel as one of the books she is anticipating the most, hopefully in 2015.

I'm anticipating the book also. I know my story line, the characters and their interplay, where the story ends, etc. Even so, the process of the story revealing itself as I write is astonishing, confusing, exhilarating. It requires the delicate balance of my conscious mind's need for control and my muse's need for creative license.

I hope the result garnishes fans as loyal and enthusiastic as Ramisa and others who have encouraged me on this adventure.

The chatty muse

I've had the great gift of some time off work and have spent several hours each day immersing myself in the historical era of my fictional world. It's gotten so that even during routine events, my muse has been chatty. I listen and take notes.

I recently reread a scene I wrote a few weeks back. In it, my main character confesses her wrongdoing to a priest, and I judged the scene to be good but somewhat predictable. Near the end of the reading, my muse tickled my conscious thought with a question - who is that listening outside the confessional? And I thought Yes! There is someone there! And a more powerful scene (and turn of events for the whole novel) was born.


Early on summer mornings, I pull the pool cover aside to create a swim lane. There, between the solar cover and the pool wall, I swim laps, careful to stay on the straight and narrow, avoiding bumps by straying off course. I did this one morning, thinking about my character, when it hit me. She too is in a narrow divide, and if she veers a little to either side, she will be in big trouble. So I wrote a scene, loaded with symbolism, in which she takes an early morning swim in a pond and notes her thin secure path between the tangle of lily pads and towering cattails, between the mucky pond bottom and the open sky, between the fading night and the brightness of day.

Climbing out of the pool yesterday, something dark stuck to my leg. It's a chlorinated pool so it was just one of those 'helicopter' maple seeds, but my initial thought was that it was a leech, fairly common in ponds and lakes. And I thought - ah, more symbolism. A leech can be stuck to her leg when she climbs out of the pond.

So on I go, listening and writing.

Scratching the itch

I've been feeling the itch to write more. But the practical aspects of living - spending time with people I love, working, taking care of my home and my health, participating in community and church activities, etc. - have left me precious little time to write.


Don't get me wrong. I am involved in each and every one of these activities because I enjoy them. They fulfill me in different ways, connect me to the bigger world and allow me to use different gifts and graces. But I find myself frustrated, trying to carve out small bits of time to jot down notes and read some background material. Honestly, it's not enough time to immerse myself in ideas and characters, and I need that to satisfy my muse.

Michael and I talked about it yesterday. I think we came up with a way to create a Writers Retreat of sorts. Not a physical place. More like an escape from other commitments which chip away at my writing time. So we're going to try it next weekend, and my hope is for a good 10+ hours of planning and writing.
I wonder if that much scratching will satisfy my itch. Part of me thinks it will ease the itch for a time. But I bet the overall effect will be like scratching a mosquito bite - I'll just spread the venom through my system and overall, the itching will increase. So be it.

The angel in the marble

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
- Michelangelo

What an amazing gift Michelangelo had (the sculptor, not the Ninja Turtle), that ability to see the potential beauty in a hunk of stone. Those of us mortal types, more human and less divinely inspired, plod and struggle in our efforts to create beauty. I need help to see the potential of my work and I certainly need help to carve it away from its stone base.

To the rescue - the Writers' Group at the Dietrich Theater in Tunkhannock. Our weekly critique sessions center around our collective need for input regarding our latest writing efforts. In 10-page segments over many months, I presented my novel to the group and got their feedback on everything from voice to punctuation, from characterization to dialogue. Many segments were handed back to me with a 'nice try, but fix this and bring it back again' approach. The opening chapter alone was rewritten a dozen times, maybe more. But with each rewrite, with each round of revisions large or small, the angel in the marble began to take shape.

Yesterday, a potential agent suggested changes I hadn't thought of, ones that would increase the uniqueness of the piece and its saleability within a tight publishing market. How wonderful that all along this journey, I've had people around me who see a way through to find the angel when all I see is stone.

The muse speaks, I hope

Advice to writers is everywhere - in books, magazines, on the internet. It'd be easy to spend all my 'writing time' just reading blogs, taking courses, etc. but much of the advice is redundant. Leave it to Lin Oliver, the funny, energetic co-founder of SCBWI to put this at the top of her advice-to-writers list: Take lots of showers.

Lin's point is absolutely right. The muse, the inspired subconscious that tells the story, can't be forced. It speaks during routine tasks, showering yes, but also while chopping onions, driving, etc. It's important for me to remember that while I'm trying to work through revisions on my novel. I can't force the changes, they have to be unleashed from the place where my conscious efforts have tethered them.

Thanks to Bookshelf Muse for sharing Lin's list.

Now I'm gonna go take a shower.